Scriptural content of the English medieval Book of Hours: Tracing textual traditions of nine lessons from the Book of Job
Scriptural content of the English medieval Book of Hours: Tracing textual traditions of nine lessons from the Book of Job

Summary/Abstract: This contribution examines nine lessons from the Office of the Dead, foundin a group of English translations of the Book of Hours. The text of the lessons comesfrom six chapters of the Book of Job and therefore constitutes scriptural content ofthis medieval prayer book. Selected for this analysis are four primers as well as thetwo vernacular versions of the Bible available at that time, namely the Early andLate Version of the Wycliffite Bible (cf. Dove 2007). As far as the primers are concerned, three of them have received an edition, while New Haven, Yale UniversityLibrary, MS Beinecke 360, which is examined in this contribution, still remains to beedited and analyzed in depth. This study attempts to establish the textual traditionof its non-psalmic scriptural passages as well as that of other primers. This will beachieved by performing comparative analysis expressed by objective mathematicalvalues, with the results presented in tabular form and illustrated with fragmentsof the actual text. The analysis performed in this paper will shed some light on thecomplicated history of scriptural content of the selected English primers.

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